There is no denying that Far Cry is currently one of the most graphic intensive games on the market, utilizing PS2.0 technology (the latest versions support Shader Model 3.0 with DX9c) and offering an exceptional visual experience there is no denying that even some of the faster graphics cards struggle.

Although it was released in March 2004, Far Cry's game engine is still demanding enough to stress out the capabilities of today's graphics cards. Given a high enough resolution with appropriate visual effects, it can bring even the toughest of graphics system crawling to a halt. This means that it more than retains its value as a benchmarking platform.

We tested using HardwareOC's custom Far Cry benchmarking application. We used the four HardwareOC timedemos included as part of the included demo set, ran each one three times and averaged the results. At 1024x768 the results were pretty respectable. Some of the timedemos were a bit slow, resulting in jerky performance, whereas others weren't too bad.

At 1600x1200 however, there was an overall drop in performance of 48%, resulting in frame rates across the board which were pretty much unplayable. In the timedemos, bots are static, so the AI processing component is taken out of the equation, which means that you'd expect the in-game performance to be even lower.

We at TweakTown openly invite the companies who provide us with review samples / who are mentioned or discussed to express their opinion of our content. If any company representative wishes to respond, we will publish the response here.